XVI. I release you from this head of Sentiments, with observing that we sometimes conclude a writer to have had a celebrated original in his eye, when “without copying the peculiar thought, or stroke of imagery, he gives us only a copy of the impression, it had made upon him.”
1. In delivering this rule, I will not dissemble that I myself am copying, or rather stealing from a great critic: From one, however, who will not resent this theft; as indeed he has no reason, for he is so prodigiously rich in these things, as in others of more value, that what he neglects or flings away, would make the fortune of an ordinary writer. The person I mean is the late Editor of Shakespear, who, in an admirable note on Julius Cæsar, taking occasion to quote that passage of Cato,
O think what anxious moments pass between
The birth of plots, and their last fatal periods,
Oh, ’tis a dreadful interval of time,
Fill’d up with horror all, and big with death,
observes “that Mr. Addison was so struck and affected with the terrible graces of Shakespear (in the passage he is there considering) that, instead of imitating his author’s sentiments, he hath, before he was aware, given us only the copy of his own impressions made by them. For,
Oh, ’tis a dreadful interval of time,
Fill’d up with horror all, and big with death,
are but the affections raised by such forcible images as these,
——All the Int’rim is
Like a Phantasma, or a hideous dream
——The state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an Insurrection.”
The observation is new and finely applied. Give me leave to suppose that the following is an instance of the same nature.
2. Milton on a certain occasion says of Death, that she
“Grinn’d horrible a ghastly smile—”
P. L. B. II. v. 846.